Put the kettle on!

Increasing your creativity should be a fun process, but have you considered tea?

Actually, it might not be tea itself that enhances creativity, but the positive mood it induces.

Having already established that tea improves performance on the Remote Associates Test (which enhances insight thinking, or the “A-ha!” experience), scientists have now concentrated on divergent creativity (the kind that produces options, such as various ways to use a brick).

In a “names for a restaurant” test, participants who drank tea in the 10 minutes before the test suggested more, and more creative, ideas than those who had drunk water.

For other, rather frivolous, creativity enhancers, look at How to be more creative, Creative awe, Creative curiosity, Sarcasm makes you more creative, and Zap your creativity.

These are all fun suggestions, and worth a try, but ideally they should be replicated (redone successfully) before we can take them too seriously.

In The principles of creativity, I have compiled a list of things of which some had been researched, and some are recommendations that have been part of the creative world almost since its (modern) inception in the 1950s.

Source

Huang, Y., Choe, Y., Lee, S., Wang, E., Wu, Y., & Wang, L. (2018). Drinking tea improves the performance of divergent creativity. Food Quality and Preference, 66, 29–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2017.12.014 (Open access article)